Operant Innovations 058 | Learning, Teaching, and Context with Joshua Levins

[MUSIC] Welcome back to another episode of "Operant Innovations." My name is Maddie Duke. Today with me, I have Josh Levens from Creative Learning here in Brevard, Florida. Welcome, Josh. >> Thank you, Ryan, for me. >> So just to get started, tell me a little bit about who you are, what do you do? >> Right now, I'm a BCBA creator planning. Like you said, it's in Brevard. It's a program that's near and dear to me. It started actually in my childhood home. It wasn't originally an ABA therapy center. It is now it started as a special education program. Over the years, it transitioned from an actor school program to an actual facility for special education. Then they moved on to ABA and that's a multidisciplinary therapy clinic or therapy center. In terms of, I guess, education, I went to Auburn where we go, I guess. My first degree is in psychology and then I have a second degree in agriculture that I did concurrently with my master's degree and that I got from Kampela. >> Cool. So doing those two concurrently was becoming a BCBA, your plan for what? >> Not. >> ABA and agriculture at the same time. >> Originally, I thought I was going to do something in agriculture and I did for a long time. I worked in hydroponics and I still sometimes do. But like I said, creative learning was something I've been around for a very long time. When I came back to Florida, I worked there as a transitionary period before I was going fully into hydroponics. I thought I'm up and I was like, okay, this is what I want to do. At the time, they had already become an ABA center. So if you want to do this permanently, the natural regression was for me to go to school for ABA and become a BCBA. >> That's awesome. I'm seeing here you've been a BCBA for just over a year, right? >> Yeah, in October, I think it was the 10th was my one year anniversary as a BCBA. >> Congratulations. >> I know for BCBs that have been the field of for longer, they would take their tests and they had to wait to get their results. I knew that day. So it was super nerve-wracking. I took my tests and sat there and I was like, "Oh, do I want to know if I passed?" >> That's funny. People had to wait three months. Find out? >> Yeah, the two people that basically mentored me through my 1,500 hours, they had to wait three months and they had a letter in the mail. >> I did know that it used to be like hand scored. It was like kind of like short answer and you would like write your answer to the stereo and like two people would score it and then like I/OA. So I guess that kind of makes sense that seems time consuming. >> Yeah, that definitely seems like it would be a little longer than it instowed. >> Yeah, for sure. I'm glad that it is instantaneous now. >> Okay, so what we're kind of here to talk about is your practice model and kind of how you approach ABA with your clients. Maybe a good way to kind of start because I did scroll through some of what you have to say. I think a good place to start might be to kind of just provide some context or the kind of learners and clients that are primarily coming to your clinic. >> Okay, for sure. Our clinic right now we have five BCBAs on staff and everyone kind of has their own population that they do really well with and that they prefer to work with. I sort of fell into a lot of early learners and so a lot of my guys are between the ages of three and seven years old and that ranges from kids who are high support needs that had been retained multiple times in like a VPK setting or a kindergarten setting and kids that are lower support needs that just weren't as successful as they should have been in a first or second plate classroom. And so for my clients, a lot of the focus is on getting them ready to be able to participate in a classroom at a level that's acceptable for the school system. >> Okay, I appreciate that context. We had kind of communicated a little bit about this, but my experience has largely been with key majors and adults. And so kind of what I'm picturing in my experience is very different from the clients that you're working with. So I appreciate that kind of context before jumping into it. Let's talk about and kind of set up the situation. So your goal is a learner who can be successful in the public school system or whatever school environment their family wants them to succeed in. So what does that look like? What does a learner look like? >> So in order to operationalize a learner, I feel like you need to take it back to learning in general. Like learning is being able to engage into ABC contingencies that are provided in the classroom. So a teacher is up at the board. They point to a letter or a number and they say what is this? And the child's able to exhibit the behavior that the teacher is looking for. So naming the letter and then the teacher says good job or maybe just moves on to the next letter. So those are the ABC contingencies that are normally set up in place. The other part of that is the learner being highly successful and independent within that setting. So one of the big things that I look at for a learner is I want them to be successful at least 80% of the time. And that number came from one of my really good mentors. He is the most knowledge person I've ever met and he told me about this golden rule that they found out where if you were successful 80% of the time and you failed 20% of the time, that's where people make the most progress. They don't want you to be successful 100% of the time because that means you're not struggling. That means that the content is a little bit too easy for you. And so about 20% failure rate is what you want to shoot for. Now that being said, like obviously like 80 20 is an exact number and it's never going to look like that. But you want to be somewhere within that range. The other thing that I look at is if a child comes in with behaviors that are disruptive to a classroom or disruptive to their learning such as stereotype or for example, they like crawling underneath tables or they'll try to talk to their peers instead of attending to a teacher, you want to reduce those behaviors within that setting. And you want to replace them with behaviors that will make that child successful. The replacement behaviors that I normally look at are the ability for children to attend a stimuli, attend to a teacher from the classroom. You want to look at their verbal behavior. So can they tact? They have a strong LR repertoire. Can they do jointly controlled behaviors? Do they have a good intro-abrobable repertoire? If you say something can they echo it back? If you do something can they model it right? The motor imitations and things like that. Interesting. It's been a while since I've done clinical work. But I have also worked in a school. So I'm also picturing like yeah, like standing in front of the classroom. Teaching that course and I worked in a high school. So maybe look a little different than a kindergarten classroom or a third grade. I would also. I like how you you really talked about like within the setting too. Because I mean we can even just talk about a school, right? We want the child to be able to sit at their desk when it's time to sit at their desk. We want them to sit on the carpet for a story time when it's time for that. And we want them to run around on the playground when it's recess. So it's not that this behavior is always the way that the child has to act or they always have to look like this. It's setting specific. And that's the big thing and we kind of touched on it. You had mentioned you're out one because you worked with adults and teenagers and you worked in an NET setting most of the time. And that's completely applicable for that population because you're not teaching them the beginning of an operant. You're usually probably working on like social skills where for the younger guys where they don't have some of that verbal behavior as opposed to operants. In NET setting in work, but one of the big things and one of the things that the program and methodology I use is based on is just providing a nice strict structure and then a repetition. Just repetition of work working on these operands. I mean, currently at our center, we do like a 15, 15 schedule for a lot of my guys. And so that's like about 15 minutes of work, give or take, and 15 minutes of play where they're playing with their peers, they're working on social interactions. Because at the end of the day, like you said, like, we're not trying to build robots. We're trying to build little kids, you know? And so just like the operands in terms of tacting is important and LRs are important. It's important that these kids know how to interact with people they're age, you know? And it's important that they work on these social skills and they understand socially mediate and reinforcement. And hey, I want this little boy that I see on the playground to chase me. I need to go up to him and be like, hi, chase me, you know? That's when we're big. And I'm also really passionate about this too. I've had some bad experiences with people, with practitioners creating a versus environments for kids specifically to teach them, like to advocate for themselves. Very passionate about advocacy is a necessary skill. But if we just put them in a room with their peers and just let them do their thing, we don't need to create a versus environments for them because the kid will take their toy or will say, no, I don't want to play with you. And I just really passionate about like, they can encounter those natural things, naturally. We don't always have to create it. Yeah, naturally current consequences are very, very, very important in socially mediate sense. Do you have more that you want to say on like what goes into learning or? I think one of the big things, like you would kind of touch on it not directly, but one of the big things that I think sometimes people lose sight of is like, I am a practitioner that agrees sometimes the ends justify the means. But what you see in some cases is you see practitioners creating a versus learning environments where they're coercing children to perform. And that's something where at our program, when our direct instructor is like, who wants to go first, every kid raises their hand. And it's not because they fear a punishment. It's because they know if they raise their hand, they get better reinforcement out of it. And I think a lot of times people sometimes lose sight of the fact that like these are children at the end of the day. And just like you and I, like some days we're going to perform well. And sometimes we're going to perform poorly. And you really need to meet them at what they're capable of doing at that moment in time. And you never want to push a child to a break point where, you know, they start engaging in those big high magnitude behaviors like screaming or crying or tantruming. And if you really do want to avoid that. And I think one of the biggest important things for practitioners is like for me and the way that I was taught and the way my mentors practice is they're very big on antecedent manipulation. You don't want to be working reactively because you're already on the back foot. And so like there are little things that go into that. Like one of the big things is I had a client. When he first came to our center, he couldn't even come inside. He would come inside and stand by the door and he just scream and scream because he didn't want to be there. And so the first thing we did instead of approaching him and evoking all those behaviors, we kind of sat back and let him approach us. And we made it fun to engage with us. And so it wasn't a toleration trial. Instead it was him approaching us and us reinforcing that approach behavior. Yeah. I love that. Sometimes we do have to start with like making ourselves fun. And that's not bad. I would say it's probably bad if you're not doing that. Yeah. I mean that all breaks down into instructional control. You know, instructional control is your rapport with a client or a learner. And you know, it's like going into high school. Like I'm sure you had teachers you loved and you worked very hard for them. And then you had teachers that you didn't love and you're like, okay, I'm going to do the bare minimum. And if you don't have that rapport with a child where you're viewed as someone that's a giver and fun and reinforcing, they're never going to perform their best with you. Yeah. I was the child who was like, oh, I don't like this person. They probably don't like me. I'm going to work harder because I'm going to be their favorite, favorite. But yes, I do recognize and appreciate that standpoint of like, no, you're not going to reinforce my behavior. You're not getting it. I was the complete opposite. I had teachers I didn't like and it was just like, I am doing the bare minimum to get my A. And we don't have to speak to each other. That's okay. Like I'll learn what I need to learn, but that's it. Like we said, I've worked a lot with teenagers and adults. And I think you've kind of attached on this a little bit, but how would you change what a learner looks like for like a five year old, as opposed to like a 12 year old? So one of the big things for me is, I guess this has to do with like the population I work with age isn't something that I take into account. You kind of have to have an end goal in mind in terms of like the child support needs. There are some children where, you know, they may only need some finishing touches on social things, right? So you're talking about a child who likely has a strong repertoire in all of the verbal offerings. And maybe he just has trouble making friends, right? So learning for him or her may be like they can go out into the community and be like, Hey, what do you want to do? Oh, I want to go ask this person to do something. Okay. So this is how you do it. Go up to him and be like, Hey, my name is XYZ. Do you want to play with me? Where as a child who has high support needs, say a child who was unsuccessful in a kindergarten program because they weren't very vocal. They didn't know how to man correctly. They didn't know how to tact. They didn't know L.Rs. Learning will look very, very different for them. So you have to identify where the air is occurring is the air occurring because they have behaviors inhibiting their learning. So is it mouth out of the behaviors? Is it that they engage in aggression instead of asking for help? Is it that they engage in vocal or motor stereotomy? Can they complete an air correction sequence? So for the big thing for our practices, I use a lot of airless teaching. So the airless teaching sequence for a tact would be you break it into a jointly controlled tact in a coic, then you drop the a coic and just through the tact, you're two distractors and you run back for the tact again. For example, it would be you holding up a pen. Child doesn't know what it's called. What is it? Pen. What is it? They respond pen. So you're dropping that jointly controlled operand into just the tact and then you ask them again, well, if a child doesn't have the ability to engage in that secondary operand, like they don't have a strong a coic repertoire or if you're in L.Rs, they don't have a strong motor imitation repertoire. They're not going to be able to learn successfully. So it kind of comes down to what that child's skills are and what their deficience are and that's how I sort of analyze where I want to go with things. I feel like age can play a part in it because that's going to determine your end goal, right? So for a five year old, I don't expect him to do algebra. But for a 12 year old, I may expect him to do algebra. You know, that's the end goal. But in terms of what a learner means for them, I think it really starts with analyzing where they are as an individual and where their skills lie and where their deficience lie. Yeah. As you're talking, you're like, well, obviously, like, that's how it should be done. Like, it should be, we're going to base everything based on what your skills are now and where they need to be in your email where you described your practice model. I kind of like, latched on to this idea or I think you referred to it as a program of ready hands. So what does that look like and when is it necessary? So ready hands, and this is where sometimes as time has gone on, I've kind of changed how this program works and I've kind of changed it for clients because ready hands is a concept at the end of the day. And so for me, what I think of it as is ready hands is a DRI. So differential reinforcement in Kampag with a lot of information. behaviors, right? So if a child has their hands on top of each other in front of them on a table, they can't engage in a lot of forms of motor stereotomy, right? They can't get up and walk away. They can't engage in a bunch of behaviors. And what this allows a practitioner to do is create an environment where you have moments that all of the maladaptive behaviors and the target behaviors that get in the way of learning are gone and you end up in a situation where a lot of the functions of certain behaviors are on extinction, right? And it gives you the ability to control the situation for that learner a lot more. And so what it really aims to do is can try the situation where a child can't engage. And so that the agents are behaviors so that new novel behaviors come in and you can then reinforce those behaviors. So I mean, for example, eye contact eye contact is one that people, I whenever I read something about eye contact, I feel like it's super split down the middle. People are either like, you don't, you don't ever want to make a child engage in eye contact. What if they don't want to engage in eye contact? And other people are like, well eye contact is very important for a child to learn what I think happens a lot of the times is that people are trying to prompt behaviors out of a child instead of just shaping the behavior and allowing it to occur naturally and then reinforcing it. So what I mean by that is the main goal of ready hands is to allow some of these behaviors that people normally trying prompt to come up naturally and then reinforcing that, hey, when I look at Mr. Josh, he gives me an Oreo. Now looking at Mr. Josh is really valuable, right? Oh, when I look at the letter before he points to it, I know what the letter is and I get a good job where I get Mario, right? So it allows you to create a much more sterile environment and it all kind of plays into the bigger idea that I feel like a lot of times when learners are unsuccessful, it's because what happened was they didn't engage in some of these behaviors naturally, like they never learned how to attend naturally, they never learned how to look at someone naturally. And so they started engaging these maladaptive behaviors like crying or tantruming or throwing things or kicking and in a typical setting that will garner massive amounts of attention and it will garner massive amounts of escape to so a young child in a classroom and instead of paying attention to the teacher, he decides to throw everything on the floor, the child likely gets sent to the office then gets sent home. Well, now you've created this behavioral chain where these targeted and maladaptive behaviors are so reinforcing for a child, that's what they're going to engage in every time. And so what ReadyHands really is, is it's just a way for you to differentially reinforce an incompatible behavior and create a situation where a lot of behaviors don't have the opportunity to happen. And you can see some of these approach behaviors like eye contact or manning really start to naturally come into play and you can then reinforce and shape them. Mm hmm. Would it be safe to say that attending and ReadyHands are fairly similar? They are and this is where I mean at the end of the day I am a very young BCBA and I only have a year of experience doing this. And so like this is something that I sort of developed and my mentor like he sort of introduced me to the concept and I kind of took it in a ran with it. And so a lot of these things aren't completely fleshed out. It's something that's still evolving. You know every time that I work with a client there have been things that I've changed about it or me sitting down and thinking like what are we really looking to target here? And attending is one of those things where is there a true attending topography. I don't really know you can't just you know operationally define it because for everyone it may look different. You know for me when I was in college I would sit there and I pulled out a notebook and a pen and I would take notes on a piece of paper and I would kind of look at the teacher but I was more looking at the board. Whereas the person next to me maybe taking notes on a laptop and only looking at the teacher you know that's where you get into more things that are in other disciplines like an auditory versus visual learner right what it really has to do with is seem where your client and your learners skills are and working within those means right like I don't want to turn every kid into the same learner. I just want to work with a kid in a way that they are successful. Right. Well and again to come back to my time in the school right I'm thinking of so I was a paraprofessional in a high school meaning I taught every class. I like I taught history I taught psychology not on a regular basis right but like I subbed for all of these different classes so I'm thinking about you know attending in science class probably means you're you're pencil in your hand and you're taking notes in art class maybe you still have your pencil in your hand but maybe you're you're doodling or you're copying an art technique while the teacher is showing it as opposed to PE where you're probably standing and you know watching or learning about the rules of soccer or whatever and how like that that's kind of where like my question on like the function versus topography of attending because for me I'm like it looks different but functionally I'm showing the teacher or the BCBA or whoever that I'm paying attention that I am doing my best to get the information. Yeah and I think that's where like it starts getting weird sometimes because I feel like attending is one of those things that you can't really measure directly but you can measure the byproducts of it right you can see that when this child engages in these behaviors they have 10% more independent trials they're rate increases by 20% when they don't engage in those behaviors that child's rate and they don't have as many independent trials and so that's where attending is something that I haven't ever been able to operationally define it's more of a like hey this child is going to have eye contact then you start your trial and he looks at the stimuli and then he attacks or he's select the stimuli out of the array it was highly successful but if he's looking off in the space or he's tapping his fingers then he's much less like lead to be successful. And I think I think that there is a place to have I have an eye contact discussion here, partially because I just know that like you said people have a lot of strong opinions on it. I also will say that I recognize that my opinion is influenced by my past experience right which is my clients didn't need to engage in eye contact to get what I was saying that that just wasn't a necessary skill for them so I do fall more on the like do we really need eye contact side but functionally like I could put a sticker on the table and I could require you to look at it before we start and that would be the same thing as looking right here or even I taught some kids about job interviews and like how to have appropriate behavior during there and I would tell them to like look at forehead right good luck here like a people's noses right. All of these things are functionally the same as eye contact. I think that that is I can see exactly what you're saying and I can and I do agree in some cases where like if a child is not comfortable doing that then like why are you trying to force a kid to do something they're really not comfortable with doing if they don't have to do it you know like you can live your whole life without ever looking someone in the eyes to be honest just like you can look you live your whole life eating chicken nuggets and never eating anything else you know that goes into people's learning history now where I contact came into play for me and for some of the clients that I work with is what I found a lot of times a lot of times with younger clients who engage in a lot of stereotypies specifically is that. They were so reinforced by this massive, I didn't even know how to explain it. The Stereiotic was such a high frequency and it occurred so rapidly in such a high magnitude that they never looked at their surroundings. They never looked at people. They were only focused on themselves in that Stereiotic. What I found was as I started implementing the DRI with the ReadyHands and the ReadyHands programming, is that these kids started looking around at things and they started looking at people. It isn't something that you have to focus on and it isn't something that I require every client to do. If a client looks at me and asks me for something, I'm going to reinforce it a much higher magnitude than if they were looking away from me. That's something that happens naturally in a real life. That's a naturally occurring consequence. I think the main goal behind it is targeting the behavioral cusp of a child realizing what socially mediated reinforcement is. I want something from somebody, so I'm going to approach them, I'm going to face them, I'm going to look them in the eyes and say, "Play with me?" Versus facing away from somebody. I think that's when I started doing it, I was truly trying to target because I worked with clients that had no interest in other people. They had no interest. They didn't care who I was. They didn't care who their family was. They didn't care about any of that stuff. That's something for me where if I can set up a situation and I can reinforce certain behaviors to start working with them towards understanding and wanting socially mediated reinforcement, then I'm going to take that opportunity. Yeah. I like how you really focus on that socially mediated reinforcement and that it sounds like a lot of your clients have had just very, very strong automatically reinforced seriotope. And if the outcome is the ability for socially mediated reinforcement, i.e. relationships with other human, if that's the outcome and the pathway to getting there is non-aversive, right? If somebody is screaming and crying and pulling teeth because we're trying to have the make eye contact, we're going to stop, right? As long as that's not happening, but we're making eye contact and the result is the ability to have a relationship. I feel like that's hard to argue with. And that's where, like, for me, like, I think it all comes down to, at the end of the day, we're all very different practitioners and we service very different populations sometimes. And this goes into commentary about, like, ABA is a field in general, so you can cut this if you want. But I feel like a lot of times people try and paint ABA with a hard, fine line of you do this or you do not do this. And that is in how it works because every client is different. Every practitioner is different. What some clients may excel at, what they may be able to achieve, may never happen for other clients. And that's where you should focus on your client and you shouldn't focus on these over arching goals for every single client. And that's one of the big things where, you know, big goes back to what you said about, NET versus ITT and DTT in a hybrid setting, it is so client dependent, right? It depends on what your client needs, what skills you're targeting, and the best way to target those. And so that's something where I feel like sometimes in the field of ABA, people have strong opinions and they let those opinions get in the way of progress for the field, but also progress for clients. And I think it's a hard and it's a difficult thing to do. We did in June of this year, we did a month on what we call it, operant in negations. We did some five month episodes. They're fantastic. But we talked a lot about how ABA did a lot in terms of, and I guess I should throw in a trigger warning here for conversion therapy. A lot of conversion therapy is based on behavioral principles, or at least some amount. I don't know the broad majority, I don't know in terms of all conversion therapy research and strategies, how much of it is based on behavioral research, but some of it is. And I will not say that that is a good thing or a good use of our field or science, like that's horrible. And there are a lot of people in the neurodiversity movement who are saying similar things to what the LGBTQ+ community was saying back in the 70s. So one of our arguments with some of those episodes is that we need to know where we've been so that we don't repeat it with a different population. For sure. And like you see that a lot, I mean, even with some of the things that happened here in our home state of Florida, and some of the practices that had been used, you know, in the 70s and the 80s and even the 90s, even in some cases today, you know, they're things that aren't appropriate like they aren't. And you know, sometimes the ends you justify the means and sometimes they really don't. And that's where, you know, I feel okay, commenting on things like that and commenting on certain types of punishment procedures. But I feel like sometimes people take that same mindset and they apply it to things that they shouldn't be applying it to. And I think that that closes off the fields because at the end of the day, this is a very young field, you know, this field hasn't been around for hundreds of years like math. It hasn't been around for hundreds of years like chemistry. New things are being discovered every single day. Goes back to the eye contact thing. I feel like if people sit there and talk about it and be like, hey, sometimes this is applicable. Sometimes it's not applicable. And you can come to an agreement. All you did was better the care for the clients. Yeah. And I mean, even to take that eye contact, again, I remember a client who didn't like making eye contact and the parent really wanted them to make eye contact when talking to them. And I was the RBT on the case. So I wasn't like the ultimate decision maker. But what we came to was orienting towards the parent and looking in the vicinity of their face. So parent wants eye contact. Client does not as was a teenage client and to be kind of met in the middle. It's okay to meet the middle sometimes. Yeah. And I mean, that brings up another point that sometimes I think is very important to talk about, you know, at the end of the day. I don't think parents need to do harm to their children, but sometimes I feel like they get caught up in certain ideas. I mean, for example, this is one that has come up for me is I had a client where his parents really wanted him to eat different foods because he only really liked eating one type of food. And as far as I'm concerned, you know, this child to have like high magnitude aggressive and property destruction. Are you really concerned that he only wants to eat one type of food? Is this what is most beneficial for your child right now in this moment? And I asked them and they're like, yes, and it's like, okay, I hear what you're saying. I feel like, you know, and I'm not trying to place the blame on parents because, you know, sometimes they, I feel like people get caught up in things and they really do only mean the best for their kids. But there are times where I feel like sometimes it doesn't come out the best ways. And I mean, for example, the eye contact thing with that parent or like the eating thing with one of my clients parents. Sometimes I feel like as practitioners, we get caught up in that like retail mindset. of like the customers never wrong. And I think that people get lost. And at the end of the day for me and the way I think about it now is, for me, I'm only here for the client. That's really the only person that I care about. If they have the ability to have a great relationship with their parents or whatever, then that's fantastic. But I'm gonna advocate for my client over anybody else, over any other stakeholder. And I think that just goes into at the end of the day, a lot of times our clients can't advocate for themselves. I mean, fortunately for you, you worked with a population that was older and a lower support need, so he could advocate for himself. But a lot of practitioners work with clients that cannot advocate for themselves. And I feel like that's very, very unfortunate and that causes a lot of situations where people are implementing these programs that become massively immersive. And no one really steps in and is like, "Hey, this isn't what the client wants." And I'm not saying that what the client wants is always right every single time 'cause I'm sure some clients don't wanna learn how to do math. They don't wanna learn how to sit appropriately. They don't wanna learn how to man. They'd rather throw things around. They'd rather never learn how to count. But I feel like a lot of times people, they don't follow the learner. And I think that that's something that is very, very unfortunate about this field sometimes and something that I feel like everybody as a practitioner or a researcher or whatever your role in this field is that they can be better at. He's the thing of the day, all that really matters is that the client is able to get more reinforcement out of their environment and more reinforcement out of people than when they came to you. - Yeah. And sometimes parents do do their environment better. 'Cause we don't follow them around 24/7 'cause that would be weird. But yeah, I mean, it is like with everything we've been saying, right, like the context matters and it's complicated. - Yeah, and that's like a big thing. And I think that's just like, you know, that's something else that I think ABA sometimes practitioners get a bad rap because of the history of ABA. But you're seeing a lot of people now being more interested in ABA. And I think it's very important that we continue to shine a positive light on what we do. For example, I mean, I had gone to Faba. I had attended one of these presentations and it was from a BCBA and these three school psychologists from ECU. They were talking about how they were implementing like ABA practices within the classroom. But the very first slide on their PowerPoint was you do not go in guns blazing. You do not go in guns blazing because if the teachers feel attacked, if the teachers feel like you're saying you know better than them, you have no buy-in and you will never get anything accomplished. And so just like with our learners, instructional control and rapport are important with our parents, instructional control and rapport are just as important. I think people lose sight of that sometimes. I think that people get so caught up in being right that they let everything else fall apart to get their point across. - Mm-hmm. And so I'm thinking specifically of I was working one time, I was doing a session in home. At the same time that the BCBA was doing a parent training. So I'm working with my kid. The BCBA was just like throwing out like big word after big word after big word. And one of the kids was in kindergarten. Was it wasn't a public school part time? And like the BCBA was like, oh the teacher's doing this wrong. And if they're doing this and they're not caring about your kid and here's another big word that I'm gonna throw at you. And I just think that when you're going with guns blazing with some parents, they're just gonna kind of like freeze and be like, oh, okay, like you know what you're saying. That's also not the relationship that we wanna have. - Not at all. I don't, I think it all goes into the bigger commentary of instructional control is important in all settings. With all people and your rapport with people, it is so, so important. And there's a time and place for everything. I mean like for example, for me, I've learned a lot my first year being a BCBA. I came from very, very different field as you mentioned before. And I came from a lot less professional field where you know, I worked in a hydroponic slab and I worked with all my friends and there were no children around ever. So we kind of just talked about whatever we wanted. We had a grand bold time. It was great. All that mattered is that we got our work done at the end of the day. And how we spoke to each other didn't matter. Now I work in a field where, you know, you have to be very, very careful how you approach things with everybody. And that for me was something that was a huge learning experience and very, very humbling because it didn't matter how smart you were. It didn't matter how good you were at your job. If you were not approachable, people don't wanna hear it. And I think that, you know, a lot of times the way like I approach parent training now is usually I tell them I'm like, hey, like what's happened meeting whatever day is good for me. It has to be after five o'clock. I prefer Thursdays and most days. And let's talk about, you know, your concerns. So, you know, grab a list and write down your concerns for your kid and what you wanna see them do and what you wanna see them do better. And I feel like that really changes the narrative but then that all ties into like your building and approach behavior, right? It's not like, hey, you need to do this for your child. It's, hey, what do you wanna see? Okay, let's work on that. And I think that has increased the amount of buy and I've gotten from parents so, so much. And the rapport and the relationship is much more natural. And we can talk to each other in a way where, like, they feel respected and they feel heard. And I feel like there's actual follow through because they have buy-in on what I'm saying. But it all plays back into, you know, like you said, we aren't with these children 24/7 and a lot of the buy-in from parents or teachers or whatever setting you're gonna be working in is listening to their concerns and what the behaviors look like for them. I think it's really interesting because sometimes, you know, I've had parents tell me that like their child engages in certain behaviors at home. They're like, do they do that at your son? I'm like, I've never seen that. You're describing this child to me and I would think you were describing someone else completely. - Yeah. Well, and that's also, I think that you actually made this point like five minutes ago where you were like, that that's, we're not with the parents 24/7. So sometimes we're not seeing the same things. I wanna be mindful of your time and so, but I am gonna throw one curveball at you and ask you one more question that I did not prepare you for because I didn't realize that you are a newer BCBI. So the last question that I wanna ask you is having now been a BCBI for just over a year, what advice would you give yourself a year ago? - Oh boy, advice I'd give myself one, it would be, I've always felt that I was a very good learner. I've always done well, like asking people like what their thoughts on things were and just listening, I'm a decent listener. I think I would tell myself to stop talking so much and let other people talk more. I also think I would tell myself in any other person who wants to be in this field that rapport is more important than what you know. And if you do well with people, it does not matter what you know, people will meet you at the middle ground. People will have buy in with you in your programming. I think that was something for me, like I said, I came from a completely different field. It was like not so focused on people. It was more just focused on peer numbers and plants. And so like this field, you really wanna work on your people skills and that goes at all levels. So your people skills and your instructional control and your rapport with the teacher or with your supervisor. or with fellow BCBAs, with your clients, with your parents. The other thing that I would tell myself is, don't ever get comfortable in what you do and always try and branch out and do better. And I feel like that's something where there have definitely been periods for me, even in this last year, where I got very comfortable doing what I was doing. So I would implement a program that had worked with a previous client on a new client, and it fell apart and I was just kind of like, oh, I don't really know what to do. And I kind of stuck with it longer than I feel like I should have. And now one of the big things in my mentor, like he told me this from the very beginning, because he's very much into precision teaching. Within three data points, if you were not increasing in some way or doing something right, you better start changing things because the learner is always right, and you are not going to force a square peg into a circle hole. Thank you so much. I'm sorry for taking a few extra minutes of your time. No, you're completely fine. Thank you for being here and for sharing your service model, your thoughts, your advice. So I very much appreciate it. Thank you so much for the opportunity. It's not very often I get to talk to other people in the field, honestly. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of operative innovations. From back next week, we release new episodes every Wednesday.